“Which one of your candidates is the one that fired his campaign manager?”
I happened to be standing at the Staunton-Augusta Democratic Party booth at the Augusta County Fair last week when that question was directed at a volunteer. The reference was to a report from University of Virginia politics professor Larry Sabato from earlier in the week that had the Creigh Deeds campaign quietly taking control of the campaign from campaign manager Joe Abbey citing issues with the direction of the campaign.
The Deeds camp has vehemently denied that Abbey has been taken out of the captain’s chair on the Deeds campaign ship, but obviously the damage has been done in terms of the story that made its way into the press.
“Well, I saw it on Channel 29 News,” the woman who raised the issue at the fair insisted, “and they couldn’t say that if there wasn’t something to it.”
It didn’t matter whether it was true or not, I learned as I talked with the woman. “We need to do something to fund our schools. Gov. Kaine has cut things to the bone, and we’re not going to have a school system if that keeps going,” she said.
Funny how things are perceived, isn’t it? It’s House Republicans who have been cutting spending in Richmond to the bone, and who are this campaign season promising money that isn’t otherwise there for various and sundry pet projects, further putting education funding at risk – but it’s Tim Kaine, who blazed into office promising to upgrade public pre-K education before hitting the fiscal realities of the ongoing Great Recession, who’s bearing the brunt of the criticism for their missteps.
I talked with the woman and learned from her that she’s a special-education teacher, and that she wants to see more out of Democrats on education because she knows already where Republicans stand on education issues.
“We need to do something for our kids and for the teachers,” she said.
***
Now, to borrow from the comedian Ron White, I told you that story so I could tell you this one. We’re on track to lose and lose big in November.
And yes, I know it’s only mid-August, and that Deeds was behind big-time as close as three weeks out in the Democratic Party primary before roaring back to win a landslide over a pair of better-funded and better-known candidates in Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran.
And I’m not one who looks at the move last week to highlight McDonnell’s controversial views on the reproductive rights of women as being one of desperation, not at all. In fact, I’ve been of the opinion dating back to the spring that McDonnell should be forced to answer for his ultraconservative stances on social issues like abortion and gay rights, and that if he is forced to address his background on social issues he will lose a significant amount of support among moderate undecided voters.
So no, it’s not on the issues that I think we’re losing and losing big. Where we’re struggling is the Politics 101 of GOTV – get out the vote.
I’m still waiting for my first formal contact from the Deeds campaign regarding coordinated campaign activities – and the significance of that for those who don’t follow my columns on a regular basis is that in addition to being the editor of AugustaFreePress.com I’m also the chairman of the Democratic Party committee in Waynesboro. Which means I have two pretty important reasons to have had formal contact with the Deeds campaign, to schedule an interview to expose Creigh in-depth to our progressive reader base at the AFP and to schedule a campaign visit and line up other activities like canvassing and local phone banking as the local party chair.
I understand from talking with other local party leaders here in the Valley that we’re all behind the 8-ball in this respect, which is all the more surprising given how we’re being told that it should be a selling point that we’re running a country boy from Bath County whose old House of Delegates district used to run up to the City of Staunton at the top of the state party ticket.
The thinking is that perhaps the Deeds people are taking support in the mountain footprint for granted, but it would be foolish to do so given what happened in 2005 when Deeds squared off with Republican Bob McDonnell in that year’s race for attorney general. I ran numbers on the Deeds-McDonnell race including vote totals in Bath County and Highland County west of the Valley and then Rockbridge County, Augusta County and Rockingham County and the cities of Buena Vista, Lexington, Staunton, Waynesboro and Harrisonburg in the heart of the Valley, and confirmed what I had suspected to have been the case, that McDonnell outpolled Deeds here in the central mountain region by more than 7,000 votes of the nearly 70,000 votes cast in the ’05 state elections, winning the area by a 55.1 percent-to-44.9 percent margin.
I say that I suspected the poor Deeds showing here in ’05 to have been the case because I remembered hearing then what I’ve been hearing from local Democrats this year, that Deeds has been looking past us to run in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.
The hard thing for me to figure is that Deeds lost his home region by 7,000 votes in an election that he lost statewide by 323 votes and isn’t figuring that it might make sense to shore up the home front so that he can close up the leak to the other side as best he can.
The only thing I can surmise is that they’re not overlooking us out this way but instead have simply written us off.
That I’m writing this column on a day when McDonnell is traipsing around Downtown Staunton in a city that gave a strong majority to Barack Obama last November is not coincidental at all, for those keeping score at home.
***
More issues with perceptions: I was discussing this with my wife this morning, and she jumped on the topic with ferocity, pointing out that Gov. Kaine hasn’t exactly been a fixture out our way in his term.
“We both get the press releases and press schedules from the Kaine administration. Everything they do is Northern Virginia, Richmond, Norfolk. It’s almost like we don’t even exist,” she said.
I will say here that Gov. Kaine does seem to have lost his sense of direction since his friend Lt. Gov. Kaine rode off into the sunset four years ago. Lt. Gov. Kaine, I remember, was instrumental in the formation of the Virginia Poultry Growers Co-op up in Rockingham, to cite one example of his attention to detail in Valley matters. Gov. Kaine makes an obligatory trip to the Valley every so often, and even though I am usually in attendance I can’t tell you right off what the significance of any of the visits might have been, if there was any significance.
Mark Warner, on the other hand, you can’t beat that guy out of the Valley with a stick, even now that he’s in the United States Senate, and he still finds the time for random weekend events in his favorite-place-to-be, Staunton, where they might as well add a Warner bedroom onto the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace he’s here so much.
Remember how Warner won in ’01. He threw the playbook of Mary Sue Terry and Don Beyer that had Democrats focusing on the Golden Crescent of NoVa, Richmond and Hampton Roads in the trash in favor of a four-corners strategy that had him competing statewide for every vote he could get. And this was a guy from Harvard and GW with a house in Alexandria and more money than God. And he sold us on what he could do for Western Virginia and Southwest and Southside, then rolled his sleeves up and made stuff happen out our way as governor.
The idea that Creigh Deeds is above having to do that because he’s from here is, well, it’s not something that worked in ’05.
***
I hope somebody out there is paying attention. My fear is that we’re going to maintain the sense of complacency that has been marking our lack of effort since the June 9 primary and just assume that Creigh will discover lightning in a bottle like what happened before the primary that led him to his big win there.
My recommendations for how to get this thing turned around:
– Get the Warner people more involved. And not just token involvement. It’s got to be insulting for me to suggest that Warner can give Deeds some good advice on how a state-ticket Democrat can win in rural Virginia, but the numbers from ’05 don’t lie. If necessary, bring Mark along and let him do all the talking. That’s how there is a Gov. Kaine, if you recall the turning point in the ’05 gubernatorial race. And Warner’s approval ratings have him more popular than a winning lottery ticket right now. So you could do worse.
– Keep up the pressure on McDonnell’s social conservatism. That one is a clear winner up in NoVa. It won’t be enough to turn the race around in and of itself, but it gets us into the third quarter with the game back on the line.
– Organization, organization, organization. The Obama team won last fall because they were on top of things months before anybody on the outside was paying any attention. Elections are won and lost in the trenches, and we’re getting creamed in the trenches.
Which is to say, it’s not that I’m taking it personally that the campaign hasn’t gotten in touch with me for an interview or to schedule a Deeds visit to Waynesboro or to coordinate other campaign activities. It’s that I wonder what other bases are being left uncovered, and worry that we’re running out of time to get things back on track.
***
As to the stakes, I refer back to the conversation that I had with the special-ed teacher at the county fair last week.
It’s far beyond hoping my team wins for me. It’s about getting Virginia moving forward, and knowing what happens if we fall short of our electoral goals in November.
It’s a Virginia economy crippled by a crumbling transportation infrastructure. And Virginia students being left behind by cuts to K-12 and higher education. And the machinery of Virginia state government being used to limit the rights of Virginians.
To put it bluntly, we can’t afford to keep screwing this up like we are right now.
– Column by Chris Graham
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